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Cloud Collars and Sleeve Bands: Commercial Embroidery and the Fashionable Accessory in Mid- To-Late Qing China

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Cloud Collars and Sleeve Bands: Commercial Embroidery and the Fashionable Accessory in Mid- To-Late Qing China Fashion Theory The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture ISSN: 1362-704X (Print) 1751-7419 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfft20 Cloud Collars and Sleeve Bands: Commercial Embroidery and the Fashionable Accessory in Mid- to-Late Qing China Rachel Silberstein To cite this article: Rachel Silberstein (2017) Cloud Collars and Sleeve Bands: Commercial Embroidery and the Fashionable Accessory in Mid-to-Late Qing China, Fashion Theory, 21:3, 245-277, DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2016.1150670 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1362704X.2016.1150670 Published online: 24 Mar 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 167 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfft20 Download by: [Wagner College] Date: 10 September 2017, At: 18:06 Fashion Theory, Volume 21, Issue 3, pp. 245–277 DOI: 10.1080/1362704X.2016.1150670 © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Cloud Collars and Sleeve Bands: Commercial Embroidery and the Fashionable Accessory in Mid-to-Late Qing Rachel Silberstein Downloaded by [Wagner College] at 18:06 10 September 2017 China Rachel Silberstein researches Abstract and teaches Chinese dress, This paper explores how the growth of commercialized textile production fashion and textile history. She received her DPhil in Oriental entwined with fashionable consumption to stimulate new styles in Chinese Studies from the University women’s dress during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Focusing on of Oxford, and is currently a the development of Suzhou’s embroidery industry, the paper demonstrates Visiting Assistant Professor at Rhode Island School of Design. the shift towards the embroidered accessory during this period and dis- [email protected] cusses how production systems delineated the possibilities of fashionable dress. Combining analysis of embroidered objects with vernacular and commercial texts detailing the growth of this industry, the paper considers the impact of commercialization not only upon styles of dress, but also 246 Rachel Silberstein upon the women who wore and produced these fashionable accessories, and in so doing, connected to contemporary cultural trends. KEYWORDS: Chinese historical fashion, embroidery, commercialization, borders and trimmings For many centuries, Western thinking held that historical Chinese dress was static, absent of fashion impulse. French academic Gilles Lipovetsky was following a well-trodden path when he asserted that, “in China wom- en’s dress underwent no real transformation between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries” (1994, 19). However, scholarship of recent decades has challenged this claim that Chinese society was so stable and conserv- ative as to lack the desire for change and novelty that enabled the rise of fashion in early modern Europe (Ko 2003; Finnane 2008), and there is now a growing literature on historical Chinese fashion (Chen 2016). De- spite these advances, the topic remains controversial and many questions remain unanswered, in particular regarding the relationship between com- mercial production and fashionable consumption during the early mod- ern period. How did the commercialization of textile handicrafts impact Qing dynasty (1644‒1911) fashions? What opportunities did the rise of commercially produced articles of clothing and accessories offer women as producers and consumers? This paper explores these questions through an investigation into the embroidery industry of Suzhou, the nineteenth-cen- tury fashion center of China. By combining analysis of embroidered ob- jects with vernacular and commercial texts detailing the growth of this industry, I consider the impact of these changes not only upon fashionable styles of dress, but also on the way in which women engaged with fashion during the early modern period. The Controversiality of Chinese Fashion Downloaded by [Wagner College] at 18:06 10 September 2017 Scholarship on issues of historical Chinese fashion has tended to clus- ter around two temporal junctures: the early seventeenth century when the Ming dynasty (1368‒1644) was supplanted by the Qing dynasty (1644‒1911) (Wu 1999; Lin 1999; Dauncey 2003), and the fall of the Qing and early Republic period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Zamperini 2001). There are obvious reasons for this focus: both the beginning and end of the Qing were times of political tumult and social upheaval—transitional contexts of “social uncertainty” in which fashion tends to thrive (Cannon 1998, 25–29). Indeed, aside from Finnane’s impor- tant study of Yangzhou fashions (2008, 52–67), researchers have avoided the Qing dynasty itself. Still, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered their own kinds of fashion stimulus in the form of socio-economic change: as the so-called “second commercial revolution” of the mid-sixteenth to Cloud Collars and Sleeve Bands 247 late eighteenth century played out, a commodity economy developed, stim- ulated by the influx of New World silver, which brought vast numbers of farming households into the market economy. Qing dynasty China was a time of population growth, social mobility, steady urbanization, and the growth of a mercantile class—leading China historian William T. Rowe has suggested that, “by the mid-Qing era it was possibly the most commer- cialized country in the world” (2009, 122). The mid-to-late Qing period was distinguished not only by the rapid increase in inter-regional sales of cash crops in grain, cotton, and silk, but also a boom in the production of handicraft goods, with the growth of makers and consumers evidenced by the steady formation of markets, shops, and guilds, particularly in the Jiangnan region (around present-day Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou). Commercialization of textile handicrafts is not a topic that has received much attention from dress historians, yet it had important ramifications for fashion. While fashion may be argued to be a social behavior respond- ing to socio-cultural conditions like urbanization, population fluctuations, and the inability or disinclination of authorities to administer sumptuary regulations, its existence is predicated upon what sociologist Joanne Ent- whistle calls “particular relations of production and consumption” in her useful definition of fashion: It is a system of dress found in societies where social mobility is pos- sible; it has its own particular relations of production and consump- tion, again found in a particular society; it is characterized by logic of regular and systematic change (Entwhistle 2000, 43–48). In contrast to the considerable research into the social functions of fashion in early modern Chinese society—the deployment of fashionable dress to challenge social hierarchies and establish notions of modernity—the ap- parent lack of interest in commerce and production may be argued to have contributed to the degree of imprecision with which the Qing fashion sys- tem has been characterized, and the continued dispute over its existence. Those scholars who define fashion as a historical phenomenon and the- Downloaded by [Wagner College] at 18:06 10 September 2017 ory as specific to early modern Europe have necessarily rejected the possi- bility of other types of fashion occurring in other types of societies and cul- tures (Entwhistle 2000). Thus China, along with all other cultures outside of Western Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, has been classified with one of a number of terms: “anti-fashion,” “folk dress,” “traditional dress,” fixed dress”; systems of dress in which any change is so slow as to be barely perceptible even to the wearers themselves. Finnane’s well-argued critique of this position joined a growing cast of critics of the possessive relationship between early modern Europe and fashion. As she observed, historically the denial of Chinese fashion was founded on the limited viewpoint of eighteenth-century Western visitors to China whose claims contrast vividly with the obvious concern certain sectors of Chinese society expressed as to fashion (Finnane 2008, 19–23). Clearly, it is critical 248 Rachel Silberstein to employ empirical evidence from internal observers rather than the re- stricted evidence of Western visitors whose interpretation was determined by what Finnane terms “the repository of ways they had of describing what they saw” (2008, 9). But these restricted viewpoints are not just a historical phenomenon, they continue to impact today’s scholarship. For example, a recent survey of literature on fashion in India, Japan, and China utilized secondary studies written by Western curators on the basis of collections of Chinese dress dominated by imperial and official garments (Belfanti 2008). The dominance of such regulated dress forms in these museum studies sub- stantially limits their ability to contribute towards this comparative survey of historical fashion, yet there has been little recognition of the absence of more commercial or vernacular material in the literature, and the degree to which this absence obscures issues of historical fashion in China. Even aside from the question of sources and perspective, there are addi- tional issues. It is problematic to define fashion as a theoretical framework (thus allowing its application to all those contexts fulfilling that frame- work), yet also to restrict it to a specific society at a specific time and place (Entwhistle 2000, 44, 47–48).
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